Just curious, what do you guys actually do for a living?
Scrolling through comments here, you can tell there’s a huge mix of people, some clearly technical, some more creative, some who sound like they’ve been in the working world for decades, others who feel like students or early in their career.
No particular reason for asking, just genuinely curious what kind of professions make up this community. Feel free to keep it as vague or specific as you’re comfortable with.
Drop your profession below, and if you want, one thing about it people usually don’t expect.
Former machine learning researcher. Worked on image search, then language modeling for general search. But then VC started throwing money at it and the landscape just kinda’ changed. The research was still great in academia, but a bunch of dipshits took a useful technology and decided to use it as a way to funnel money from everyone into their own coffers.
Now I build stuff to monitor power lines and prevent wildfires.
One thing people don’t usually expect: machine learning isn’t magic. The computer doesn’t just “do the work for you”. There’s a lot of planning, theory, and experimentation around seeing if and why something works.
But then VC started throwing money at it
I had no idea the Viet Cong was still active in 2026.
i assume AI, since its related.
Was a wage slave all my life until I retired. The best I could do in life is sell my time for money. I didn’t care who I sold it to.
I studied bioinformatics, got into IT, got pushed into sales, got out cause I hated that. Now I’m a barkeeper. Not yet sure what I’ll do next. Maybe IT again, if I find a company that sucks less.
Also the sysadmin for a small non-profit, which is a lot more fun than any corporate job I had.
Junior researcher in food microbiology, with a background in general food technology.
Figuring out cheaper ways to enrich foods using microbial producers.
I was a special education teacher in an inner city school district for 11 years. I started in high school my first year and then went to elementary the last 10. It was to weird being 22 teaching 17 year olds.
Anyways, did 3-4 for a couple years, then 5-6 a couple years, finished in k-1. I was diagnosed with kidney failure a few years ago and retired early because I’m on dialysis. I invested very well so I’m good financially, but I miss working with kids, not so much getting fucked over by the school district, but that’s a wother thing.
i had a formr coworker that refused to work for district a while back, because the pay was so low, and its a district that is very sketchy. i dont blame her, she was doing the job im doing and part time at private school, which is equal or worst than public school. she went into tech, but i dont know if has programming/coding skills, right before AI was the craze.
Railway signal maintainer.
I take care of crossing warning devices, switch machines, signals, track circuits, and wayside hazard detectors.
That’s so cool. Cool job
Thanks.
I’m in education. It’s pretty alright. The kids aren’t alright, though.
Nice try, FBI.
I’m a professional pedant, but it’s only seasonal part time work.
IT, did a lot of work in a high traffic (big scale & high redundancy) environments.
Im ‘always’ right of course but I don’t give fucks enough to discuss with everyone.
Since I’ve died once I’m clearly now technically undead.
Stay at home dad 😊
City bus driver. It’s not the most exciting job I’ve ever had, but it’s a union shop(which really kicks ass!!!), has steady hours, pension, vacation/sick days, and healthcare.
It can be infuriating dealing with people who definitely do not have their shit in a pile. But it also feels really good being there for the community. I’ll probably stick with it for a bit.
Used to be cop.
Went into a completely unrelated line of work purely because it was remote, promoted from there.
Edit for the curious who want to know why I’m not a cop any more: https://lemmy.world/post/43267939
I only skimmed that to get the gist, but I do really appreciate you sharing that, and I commend you for choosing option 3. sorry that happened to you
No worries. Where I posted it on Reddit, I had it where the more granular detailed sections were blacked out spoiler-style so people could read less of it if they wanted to, but I don’t think Lemmy supports that function (yet).
We did it, guys! We finally found the good cop!
Statistically speaking it’s likely that I was somewhere close to a 5/10. If you consider that “good” so be it, but I reject the notion that just because a(n ex-)cop goes on Lemmy they must be or have been good.
I’ve tried to address the issue across many spaces, but there’s never anywhere near a consensus on what makes a cop a Good Cop, so I don’t think I or anyone else will be able to truthfully answer that question about me (or any other cop) in a way that suits most/all people.
My joke was that there are no good cops, because even the “good” ones still uphold the blue wall of silence and passively enforce systematic oppression. The entire system is designed so that cops who refuse to fall in line are quickly weeded out. Even if the “good” cops don’t directly oppress people and abuse their authority, they keep quiet about their coworkers who do. There is no “good cop changing the system from within” because the system is designed from the ground up to expel anyone who tries. So the only way to be a good cop is to stop being one.
I don’t strongly disagree with that notion, but I strongly believe that spreading the idea leads to making cops worse as a whole.
Say your message reached the eyes/ears of every single (prospective) cop, whether they (think they) (will) contribute to that problem or not.
The ones that want to contribute to that don’t care what you have to say about it; they might even get a kick out of it.
The ones that don’t want to will either be motivated towards mental gymnastics into ignoring criticism of law enforcement (“they obviously have no idea what they’re talking about” and other similar cop-outs) or look for a way out of that line of work. In other words, making people think “it doesn’t matter what I do, I will still be considered evil,” will push a lot of otherwise good people to either ignore criticism, deviate to the worse, or get out entirely. The former two are basically the logic behind Labeling Theory. Do you know who invites them with open arms? Bad Cops.
So by subtracting (potential) Good Cops and not affecting (or bolstering) Bad Cops, you make the ratio worse.
Finally someone else who shares this opinion!
One of the biggest deflating sentiments that ruins the ACAB meme is the one-two question:
“Do you think you are a good person?”+“Do you want to be a cop?”
If they’re answering truthfully, most ACABers would answer: “Yes.”+“Of course I don’t.”
The reasoning behind the latter varies, in my experience with them, from “Because there are too many bad cops (therefore I am afraid for my personal safety).” to “Because I qualify for better jobs.”
The former is, frankly, an argument from a place of cowardice. Imagine a world where nobody put out fires because fires are dangerous. Sure, it’s totally rational for one person to avoid danger, but if everyone avoids danger we are all screwed. Further, though no group is a monolith, you also see “Cops always protect their own no matter what,” come from ACABers, at which point wouldn’t that person trying to be good be one of those cops that is above any adverse action?
The latter is an argument for incentivizing good people to join law enforcement, most directly with better pay, and indirectly with not shitting on every cop just because one/some/most/etc. of them are shit.
I am a master of the custodial arts.
Cybersecurity (AppSec), was a software engineer for many years before that.
One day there was an incident and I tended to the recovery…
